You are here

The last dilemma

The Clangers creator highlights humankind's crucial choice

The fervent Channel 4 programme "The Great Global Warming Swindle", produced by the 'denyers', and its slating and rejection by the 'disaster crusaders', has taken the debate about the likely future of the world out of science, which is necessarily inconclusive, and into the realm of pseudo-religion.

Now you either 'believe in' one future or you 'believe in' another. Both attitudes are rich with indicative examples but apparently without sufficiently conclusive proof to silence the opposing unbelievers.

Underlying it all is a simple dilemma, one which concerns us all, now.

It is this:-

If we choose to believe the ‘doomsters’, and take the necessary steps to replace global warming with global cooling, civilization will have to revise its priorities and we shall, for a time, be mightily inconvenienced – and if at some later date, it might conceivably be proved to have been unnecessary – then we and our grandchildren will be alive and life on earth will continue.

If we choose to believe the ‘denyers’, decide that there is nothing to worry about and go on as usual, we shall be very comfortable, thank you – and if it should then become clear that the so-called ‘tipping point’ has passed and it is obvious that global warming has become runaway and irreversible – then we and our grandchildren will be dead and life on earth will cease.

Oliver Postgate was the creator of Bagpuss, the Clangers, Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog.

His autobiography depicts his passage from grinning show-off to grisly old git, a journey that included not only a prison sentence but also a thirty-year period working with Peter Firmin in cow-shed and pig-sty, making small films. Oliver died on 8 December, 2008